Pricing the standing stock

Ask what the legacy estate costs to keep and you get the infrastructure line. That number is real and it is the smallest of the three. The standing stock prices out in licenses, infrastructure and people-hours, and until all three are on one page, every modernization business case is an argument between guesses.

Price it like an appraiser walks a building:

1. Licenses and maintenance, the volatile layer. Pull every support contract, renewal date and audit clause. This layer can reprice itself overnight by vendor decree: ask any VMware shop that watched Broadcom move the floor to a 72-core minimum in April 2025 amid subscription-only repricing that landed some renewals at multiples of the old bill. A standing-stock price without renewal risk attached is last year's price.
2. Infrastructure, the visible layer. Compute, storage, datacenter or cloud, DR copies, the backup estate. Add the end-of-support surcharges coming to you by calendar: extended security updates for the aging Windows strata (2016's clock runs out January 2027) are precisely priced rent on standing still.
3. People-hours, the invisible layer and usually the largest. Who patches it, who answers its pages, who does its month-end care and feeding, and what fraction of your scarcest experts it consumes. Estimate in hours per month per system, from the people who do it, not their managers. Multiply by loaded cost. Sit down first.

Then, per system, one derived line: cost to keep per year, next to business function served. The output sorts itself into the only four piles that matter: cheap-and-critical (leave it alone, on purpose), expensive-and-critical (the real roadmap), cheap-and-marginal (calendar it for decommission), and expensive-and-marginal, the pile that funds the whole program, because nobody in the building will defend a $140k-a-year system serving a report three people skim.

Two rules keep the exercise honest. Date every number; a standing-stock price is a photograph, not a portrait, and renewal season changes the light. And publish the page. The estate's cost hides because it is distributed across forty budget lines; assembled in one place, it develops a constituency for shrinking it. That is the point. Nobody has ever regretted knowing what the standing stock costs. Several CFOs have regretted the year they found out.